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npm-kludge-search

Kludgy fast search of npm registry

INSTALLATION

$ npm i -g npm-kludge-search

Please be patient -- downloading and building the index takes 3-4 minutes.

COMPLETION (experimental)

You can get completion over package names. This feature is experimental and only works for bash shell at present.

$ . <(npm-kluge-search --script)
$ ni grunt-fi<TAB>

This should show you all 67 possibilities, from grunt-figlet to grunt-fixtures2js.

The alias ni is short for npm install. Making completion work for subcommands of npm is tricky; this is just a proof of concept.

Troubleshooting completion

The syntax . <(cmd) does not work with bash 3.2, which is the standard shell on OSX. If you have brew, you can get a newer version of bash:

$ brew install bash
$ exec bash -l
$ echo $BASH_VERSION
4.3.33(1)-release

COMPLETION API (experimental)

When you require npm-kludge-search as a module, it exposes one API function, complete:

complete( term, stream, done )

This will write each completion of term to stream. After all completions are written, the callback done is called.

Example:

var nks = require('npm-kludge-search');

nks.complete('foo', process.stdout, function () {});

Writes the completions of foo to stdout:

foo
foo-bar-baz
...
foounit

USE

Now you have fast local searching. For example, here is a worst-case search, where the entire index is searched in order to find a non-indexed substring, and only a single hit is returned:

$ time npm-kludge-search kludge
NAME              DESCRIPTION              AUTHOR  DATE       VERSION KEYWORDS         
npm-kludge-search Kludgy fast npm searcher =smikes 2015-01-27 2.5.0   npm, search, fast
Found: 1 packages

real	0m1.026s

Searching for a specific module by name

Use -n to search for a specific module by name. Exact match only.

$ time npm-kludge-search -n npm-kludge-search
NAME              DESCRIPTION              AUTHOR  DATE       VERSION KEYWORDS         
npm-kludge-search Kludgy fast npm searcher =smikes 2015-01-27 2.5.0   npm, search, fast
Found: 1 packages

real	0m0.302s

Full-text searching

The full text index includes package names, descriptions, keywords, and the author fields. Only one search term is supported, and there is no stemming or other fancy stuff (as yet).

To find out how many modules mention food:

$ time npm-kludge-search food |wc
      28     322    3411

real	0m0.309s

Unicode characters work, provided your terminal supports them:

$ time npm-kludge-search 目 |wc
      53     364    7860

real	0m0.930s

On my machine indexed searches run about 0.5s and full table scans run 1-2s.

Searching by author

There isn't an explicit author index, but because of the convention of prefixing author names with =, we can fake it pretty easily:

$ time npm-kludge-search =substack |wc
     473    5365   67151

real	0m0.584s

Reporters

There are currently three reporters: slow (the default), fast, and json.

The slow reporter waits until all the results are returned and then formats them nicely in a table using columnify.

The fast reporter emits a line at a time in fixed format. Paradoxically, it is slightly slower than the slow reporter.

The json reporter emits a stream of unformatted JSON objects.

Advanced Search: Boolean Operators & Regular Expressions

Not implemented yet.

MAINTENANCE/DEVELOPMENT

Rebuilding the index with fresh data

Simplest to uninstall/reinstall the module --

npm u -g npm-kludge-search
npm i -g npm-kludge-search

Manually rebuilding the index

cd $(dirname `which npm-kludge-search`)/../lib/node_modules/npm-kludge-search
rm -fr npm-all-cache.json npmdb.pft
./build-zip.sh

Get a snapshot of the npm registry index

$ curl https://registry.npmjs.org/-/all > npm-all-cache.json

This is >60 MB, so it takes a while to download.

Build a database

$ node ./bin/populate.js [--db <name> || npmdb.pft] [--from <source-json> || npm-all-cache.json]

This builds an uncompressed (directory) index; to build a one-file (zip-compressed) database, see the build-zip.sh script.

Search the database

$ node ./bin/search-db.js [--db <dbfile> || npmdb.pft] [--reporter <rep> || slow] [--name <name> || <term>]

If --name (or -n) is specified, only an exact name search is performed.

Otherwise, the search term is checked against name and substring-matched in description.

BUGS

Sometimes duplicate results are displayed. Believed fixed as of 2.5.0.

TODO

(Some of these are features on pure-fts, but all are listed here for simplicity.)

Support for passing module-name completion lists to npm. This will require returning a range of values from keys.

Faster startup by only loading the indexes that are needed.

More tests, especially performance test so we can detect performance regressions.

More tests of Unicode characters.

Pre-cook the npmdb.fts and distribute it via CDN.

Pure-fts is reasonably fast now, because all three main data tables (keys, values, fts) are indexed, and only the index is loaded at startup.

Search is currently case-sensitive; it should not be.

Regexp search is not supported.

Better documentation, more command-line options.

An author index. (This may not be needed, as searching for =name works pretty well.).

When populating index, use streaming JSON.stringify and compression.

Streaming output (currently all results are collected and analyzed to choose correct column widths)

Other reporters. CSV? Others?

Maybe add more control over what is / is not removed from the all file when indexing.

Test coverage is incorrectly reported as 100% because the bin-like modules populateDb and searchDb are not included in coverage stats. Exceptional conditions tend to be uncovered.